The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The term Artificial Intelligence (often abbreviated to A.I.) is used to refer to machines that have developed the ability to think independently, human-like personalities and/or emotions. A.I.’s can range from Robots and Androids to Super-Computers.
The 1960s and 70s were filled with assorted plots involving evil super-computers turning against humanity. From Star Wars (1977) onwards, the A.I., became something cuddly and user-friendly. The Terminator (1984) brought a return to the evil A.I. and lethal killer robot.
By the time of the rise of Cyberpunk, the A.I. had faded into the background and become an accepted part of the scenery. As debates about such heat up in the real world, the latter half of the 2010s have brought a renewed interest in the possibility of artificial intelligence and what it would look like.
A.I.’s and other machines that turn against humanity are discussed under Films About Machines Amok.
From the always interesting Michael Almereyda, an adaptation of a Pulitzer-nominated play set in a future where people replace their departed loved ones with holograms
A film that was as groundbreaking when it came out as Star Wars was in its day. The Wachowskis create a defining work on Virtual Reality themes and do so with a sublime cool and a series of breathtaking action moves that blew everybody away
The first of the sequels to The Matrix inevitably disappointed on the massive build-up. The Wachowskis leave more questions than answers, while the new action scenes are often jaw-dropping they also feel boiler-plated on
One of The Wachowskis returns to the world of The Matrix and rather wittily turns it into an anti-blockbuster about her reluctance to do so
Third of The Matrix sequels and the weakest of the series. This offers one showstopping effects sequence, on the other hand it also leaves a host of unanswered questions dangling
Third in The Asylum’s series of Mega Shark films where they borrow the Godzilla series’ idea of Mecha-Godzilla and pit the Mega Shark against a robot copy of itself. Here the Mega Shark series is starting to approach the entertaining silliness of their Sharknado films but still flounder amid tatty effects
Director Timur Bekmambetov makes a film in the Screenlife process where the screen becomes a computer screen. Set a near future L.A. where the judicial system has been replaced by an A.I
An ambitious film yet a;; contained within a single house, set on the eve of a space mission where the commander realises that the A.I. has started going wildly off-book
The seventh of Mission: Impossible films with Tom Cruise still on great form at age 61. He and the team raise the bar for the series to a new high
The eighth of the Mission: Impossible films. The previous entry Dead Reckoning was a high point in the series and this is left wrapping up the storyline in what would appear to be Tom Cruise’s final outing for the series
A surprise delight, an animated film that overspills with madcap creative energy concerning a misfit family on a road trip who come up against the machine revolution
SF film with Sam Rockwell as a lone man stationed on The Moon discovering the truth of his existence, this gained much word of mouth when it came out
From Arrowverse producer Greg Berlanti, a film about a nerd who stows away on a voyage to Mars
A.I. film directed by Ridley Scott’s son. The set-up seems awfully similar to Ex Machina – unfortunately, this sidesteps any of that fascinating questions about A.I. that film dealt in, while the latter half just becomes The Terminator before reaching a frankly unbelievable twist ending that sinks the film
A directorial outing from Mattson Tomlin, a screenwriter on the rise of recent, Chloe Grace Moretz is a pregnant woman struggling to survive in the aftermath of the android rebellion
Brit Marling is one of the most intelligent creative faces of the 2010s/20s. Here she co-writes, co-directs and stars in a fascinating murder mystery set in the tech world at a futuristic retreat
Whose bright idea was it to give us kid versions of The Avengers (ostensibly their children)? While Marvel have had an unparallelled string of hits on the big screen in the 00s, their attempts to replicate the successes that rival DC have had in animation have been a dismal failure
Strong and intelligent Cyberpunk film with Christopher Lambert dealing with a videogame character that has come to life
This falls short of being a great science-fiction film by a hairs breadth. Not the big space/action film it was sold as, more a Philip K. Dickian conceptual breakthrough film that seems to have borrowed large chunks of its set-up from Moon
This travels into very similar places to Roman Polanski’s The Tenant – a paranoid tale about a man surrounded by very strange apartment neighbours. Apart from adding some reality blurring SF twists to the mix, this does little more than churn cliches
Guy Ricthie makes a spy action film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is far more absurdly entertaining than anything you expect it to be. Hugh Grant steals the day as the super-villain of the show
There have been some impressive works about A.I. in the last few years. This plays out as Ex Machina by way of Training Day and is only notable in its ridiculous implausibility
Low-budget film that steals the premise of Westworld in the story of an amusement park that recreates the world of 1940s film noir with androids, which proceed to go amok
Imprisonment thriller where Melanie Laurent wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic capsule, this expands out to become an excellent SF film
Another horror anthology with each episode from a different directors, united around the wraparound theme of stories being told by patients in a strange psychiatric facility
SF film that plays out like it should be an episode of Black Mirror where Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple who sign up for a process where a baby can be gestated and born externally inside an egg
Interesting and well-made low-budget film about a scientist who builds an android duplicate of himself that starts to gain its own independence
Another of the unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilots, the story of an android searching for its purpose. This is excellent science-fiction, one of the most credible portraits of an android intelligence on screen up to this point, while Questor later became the model for Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation
A Bollywood venture into science-fiction that does a reasonably impressive job of trying to mount CGI superheroics … on the other hand, the plot deals in simplistic black-and-whites and draws on models of SF two decades out of date
Based on the survival horror videogame, this was the first in a surprisingly popular series of films. It also presaged a major return of the zombie film during the 2000s/10s, even if this only treads where George Romero went better before
Another unnecessary entry in a creativity-handicapped series, the continuing popularity of which is baffles. This shuffles through the familiar moves, brings back several familiar characters but only leaves me asking why I have invested some nine hours of time following this series
The Resident Evil films are designed for people who were introduced to drama via the Xbox, action sequences that can be assembled in random order and where it doesn’t matter what happens. I watched this, the sixth and final entry, with next-to-no enthusiasm but then quite unexpectedly it starts to work
One of the earliest works from Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult director of Akira, although he only contributes one episode to an anthology of anime tales with the common theme of robots. The collection contains some impressive and visually striking episodes
While the title sounds like a cheesy faux B movie, this a surprisingly serious work. Taking undeniable influence from tv’s The Tripods , it is a YA work about the fight to free Earth following a machine invasion that proves far more entertaining than anything one expects of it
Rather entertaining film from The Asylum about the machine revolution that overspills with madcap technological invention
A comedy variant on android/A.I. themes where two people use robot doubles for romantic subterfuge only for the two androids to elope together
A pneumatically inflated heroine fights the machines amid a standard array of space opera and post-apocalyptic future tropes
Lucio Fulci was a cult Italian horror director. This was the only occasion that Fulci visited the SF film, a low-budget ripoff of Rollerball by way of Mad Max featuring futuristic gladiatorial games
Katsuhiro Otomo written anime that functions as a parody of the school of Transformer robots as the artificially intelligent hospital bed of a geriatric becomes a giant ramshackle colossus rampaging through the city
The Scream series drags itself for another sequel but at least performs a course correction by bringing back original screenwriter Kevin Williamson in the director’s chair, along with appearances of many past cast
A reboot of the classic Japanese tv series about a superhero who goes into action on a motorcycle using a suit to transform into a grasshopper being
Cute robot film that essentially plays out as E.T. with diodes. It gets some laughs and has a some virtuoso effects but as SF this is a film that can only be enjoyed as mindless entertainment
Sequel to the cute robot film pushes the cutsie elements to a nauseatingly anthropomorphished extreme, having it spout smartass colloquialisms and erasing even basic credibility
At age 81, David Cronenberg is still on great form with this perversely fascinating work about the development of a technology that places cameras inside graves to observe corpses as they decay
Another in the spate of recent A.I. films of the 2010s/20s. Here one can buy android replacements for one’s late spouse but someone is hacking and causing them to go rogue
Based on Ray Kurzweil’s non-fiction book about the coming evolution of machine intelligence, this is an odd mix of documentary and SF, including a storyline to illustrate Kurzweil’s main theses … The vision is an extraordinarily utopian one but one has just a few plausibility problems with it
Joe Dante has resorted to a rehash of his biggest hit Gremlins, seemingly conceptually slung together with Toy Story – concerning an army of malevolent toy soldiers come to life
Mario Van Peebles plays a military android who defies his programming to defend the villagers he is sent to kill
This low-budget British effort seems to be making a good start as a film that deals with space travel realistically only to bog down in one of the most incomprehensible plots one has ever sat through
For reasons not clear to me, Space Jam is considered a classic. Now we get a sequel that updates it to the present featuring a different NBA star LeBron James
Spider-Man: Homecoming was Sony’s Spider-Man reboot where the elements came together with winning regard and Tom Holland’s politely eager nervousness made for a fantastic Spider-Man. This was the first sequel.
Long-awaited revival of the tv series on the big screen. While this has a mixed fan reception, it is well worth re-evaluation. It is the only one of the Trek films that reaches for epic, mind-expanding places to find something of a 2001: A Space Odyssey
Sequel to Starship Rising, a space opera that does some amazing things with effects on a next-to-no budget
Action film about an artificially intelligent fighter plane that goes amok. Rob Cohen directs in all the cliches of the genre and the seeming need to have something spectacular happening every few minutes
Another android gone amok film with former sex symbol Megan Fox cast as an android nanny who starts defying her programming
Beautifully made Mamoru Hosoda film about a rogue A.I. taking over a social media network. A film that is also a heartwarming work about family togetherness
We have had some standout A.I. films in the last few years. This is comedy variant where Melissa McCarthy is befriended by an A.I. who adopts the voice of James Corden
The nadir of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, one where the desire to add a comedy element in the form of Richard Pryor overtakes and wrecks what is already a random and unfocused plot
A very different take on the Superman story that asks What if Superman had grown up in the Soviet Union rather than in the US and become a paragon of Communist virtue
Pilot for the excellent Bruce Timm Superman animated tv series of the mid-1990s. This retells the Superman origin story, keeping great faith to the comics, while adding some fantastic action scenes
The celebrated Walter Hill directs an Alien-inspired film about a mutated killer loose on a spaceship. This was a problem-ridden production that pans out far less interestingly than it promises to be
We have had a spate of films in the last few years about androids and A.I. This has to count as the first film about an android stalker
This comes with an intriguing central premise – a woman is imprisoned in the house of a mad tech genius where her only hope of escape is befriending his home security A.I. that is hungry for input about the world. An interesting idea alas doesn’t carry it past an ill-informed idea of how an A.I. would behave
A Bollywood take on the android/A.I. themes, where a roboticist falls for an android girl and tries to have her accepted by his family
The first sequel to The Terminator where James Cameron returns with the biggest budget for a film at the time. Cameron harnesses then top-drawer CGI technology to create one of the most original nemeses in any SF film
After the highs of James Cameron’s first two Terminator films, this was a crashing disappointment. Schwarzenegger is back but his performance has become self-parody and the uninspired action sequences are accompanied by some terrible effects
The sixth Terminator film that boasts the return of both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton to the franchise. After the troughs of Terminator: Genisys, this makes one forget about the last three sequels
A hodgepodge of competing elements – an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger, a soft reboot, alternate timelines, reintroduction of the familiar, twists to the familiar – that make no sense on a narrative level, least of all come anywhere near what James Cameron delivered back in the first two films
The fourth Terminator film is slightly better than you would expect of something directed by the empty-headed McG. There are some undeniably spectacular action sequences, although the film still stands too much in the shadow of what has gone before
Very strange French SF film about a futuristic truck race
The one and only solo outing from Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello fame made after the duo’s split-up and just before Lou’s death. The film is essentially a comedy remake of the previous year’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman in which Lou’s newlywed wife abruptly becomes a giant
Earnest, sincere film where deaf Timothy Bottoms receives an operation that allows him to hear again, as well as builds an A.I.
A film that bites off some Big Ideas from the transhumanist movement – A.I., nanotechnology, and especially Mind Upload – and fails to do anything with them except for reach for hoary cliches of Frankenstein science. A film that, despite its self-importance, ends up as only a better budgeted version of The Lawnmower Man
Michael Bay takes on the 1980s toy phenomenon, turning it into a massive blockbuster filled with copious mass destruction and machines beating the metal crap out of each other
Are there any new creative directions that Michael Bay feels he he has to explore for a fourth Transformers film? All the Transformers beating the crap out of each other and copious mass destruction has become hard to tell one of the films from each other
The third of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. While the human scenes opt for a ghastly miscalculated sense of humour, the effects houses are at the peak of their game, even if Bay allows them to drag the mass destruction out to a numbing excess
The first of Michael Bay’s Transformers sequels has even better effects and more copious mass destruction to the point it washes over you without any effect
The seventh of the live-action Transformers films, the second made after Michael Bay stepped down from the director’s chair
The fifth of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. This comes with more of an outright comedy focus than any of the other films where Bay seems to be second-guessing his critics and spoofing his own peccadilloes in quote marks, only to produce the silliest entry in the series yet
Animated theatrically released spinoff from the original Transformers tv series. The film mostly serves to highlight the considerable number of characters where to the uninitiated it is frequently difficult to tell one side from the next.
A flop in its day, nobody at the time saw how revolutionary this was in that it predicted the idea of cyberspace and the internet. The design of the world inside the computer all in candy apple colours and geometric shapes is extraordinary
Tron was a groundreaking work that predicted the advent of cyberspace. Three decades on, this sequel never does anything as imaginative, although advances in effects technology allow for a dazzling reinvention of The Grid
An SF film where a remote probe lands to Mars uncovers a mysterious artefact of possible alien origin on the Martian surface. And then things start getting weird.
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology
2001: A Space Odyssey did not need a sequel but this fits the bill surprisingly well. A warmer and much more human film than Stanley Kubrick made, this has some of the very best effects of its era.
This was made before Ex Machina and has a surprisingly similar plot – although takes it even further in many regards – where a woman journalist goes to interview a tech genius and ends up in a romantic triangle between him and his android creation
Sequel to Roland Emmerich’s Universal Soldier, this brings back Jean-Claude Van Damme but otherwise substitutes a brain dead plot that has him facing an evil A.I.
Leigh Whannell, James Wan’s BFF and co-writer on the Saw and
Completely ridiculous martial arts SF film with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as a future cop fighting a videogame character incarnated in the real world
One of the numerous Virtual Reality films to come out in the mid-90s, this seems undecided whether it wants to be an SF or an erotic film
Director Brett Leonard started the fascination with Virtual Reality off with The Lawnmower Man but shot himself in the foot with this absurd braindead follow-up in which Denzel Washington pursues a madly OTT Russell Crowe as an android serial killer
A near-dialogueless story of a lonely robot clearing up junk in the aftermath of civilisation. This is surely Pixar’s most endearing film to date where they are operating at the peak of their creativity
Prequel to the Chinese spectacular about the construction of an engineering project to move the Earth, this comes with some epic-sized effects sequences
This was the first film to ever depict the internet with Matthew Broderick as a teen innocent hacker who accidentally hacks in and triggers a nuclear alert thinking he is playing a computer game
WarGames was a thriller that was way ahead of its time; this sequel is no more than video fodder exploiting recognition factor that reduces the original to hacker movie cliches in a technically ill-informed and incoherent plot
This is like a version of The Stepford Wives updated to the era of Ex Machina and the modern A.I./android film
Film that imagines what might have happened if the Y2K Bug had occurred and resulted in a machine revolution
Films about androids and artificial intelligence have taken off in the 2010s. This comes produced by Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner, the defining classic on the theme; on the other hand, it ends up in the hands of a director who specialises in relationship dramas
Very much informed by Blade Runner, this features Guy Pearce as a futuristic detective on the trail of a missing girl in the android zone